The Culture of Diagram

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Synopsis
The Culture of Diagram is about visual thinking. Exploring a terrain where words meet pictures and formulas meet figures, the book foregrounds diagrams as tools for blurring those boundaries to focus on the production of knowledge as process. It outlines a history of convergence among diverse streams of data in real-time: from eighteenth-century print media and the diagrammatic procedures in the pages of Diderot's Encyclopedia to the paintings of Jacques-Louis David and mathematical devices that reveal the unseen worlds of quantum physics. Central to the story is the process of correlation, which invites observers to participate by eliciting leaps of imagination to fill gaps in data, equations, or sensations. This book traces practices that ran against the grain of both Locke's clear and distinct ideas and Newton's causality—practices greatly expanded by the calculus, probabilities, and protocols of data sampling. Today's digital technologies are rooted in the ability of high-speed computers to correct errors when returning binary data to the human sensorium. High-tech diagrams echo the visual structures of the Encyclopedia, arraying packets of dissimilar data across digital spaces instead of white paper. The culture of diagram broke with the certainties of eighteenth-century science to expand the range of human experience. Speaking across disciplines and discourses, Bender and Marrinan situate our modernity in a new and revealing light.
Copyright:
2010

Book Details

Book Quality:
Publisher Quality
Book Size:
296 Pages
ISBN-13:
9780804773256
Related ISBNs:
9780804745055, 9780804745048
Publisher:
Stanford University Press
Date of Addition:
Copyrighted By:
Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
Adult content:
No
Language:
English
Has Image Descriptions:
No
Categories:
History, Nonfiction, Science, Art and Architecture, Literature and Fiction, Language Arts
Submitted By:
Bookshare Staff
Usage Restrictions:
This is a copyrighted book.

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